


Blessed

by greygerbil



Category: Original Work
Genre: Fantasy, Gen, superhero-like powers existing in a high fantasy setting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-18
Updated: 2019-03-18
Packaged: 2019-11-23 14:25:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18153029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greygerbil/pseuds/greygerbil
Summary: Synne has been blessed by the gods and through that has drawn the attention of people who previously did not even know she existed.





	Blessed

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ashling](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashling/gifts).



> I loved this idea and I hope I managed to write something you enjoy!

“You are such a beautiful girl.”

Everild smiled at her as she circled Synne, who felt just a little bit like a cow at market day, but could hardly fault the lady for doing so. She had paid enough to become Synne’s mother, after all – enough to give her five younger siblings a life outside the silver mines, to pay ten times over for any apprenticeship in the city the boys wanted and a dowry for the girls that would give them the pick of well-to-do freemen. 

“Your brothers can be knights,” Lord Warrick had told her, “your sisters ladies-in-waiting to noblewomen. Your father doesn’t have to work another day in his life.”

When her new parents died, Synne would inherit the lands and the titles, too. All in all, she could not complain if they wanted to inspect her.

For most of her fourteen years on this earth, Synne hadn’t been gods-touched. Most people who were had been blessed before birth and came into the world already different; only a very few acquired the boon at the end of childhood, and none after. Having worked in the mine shafts all her life, carrying metal and stones, breaking valuables out of the walls with sharp iron, it had never been surprising that Synne was strong. But slowly, as she grew from a girl into a young woman, she had started to outdo the biggest men working in the mines with little effort, carrying in one hand loads they laboured on in pairs. When this summer passed, the only thing that had seemed to limit what she could lift anymore was whether she could grab on to it somehow. She figured elsewise, she could rip a house straight out of the ground.

People in her village and the surrounding ones had begun to whisper of the gods-touched girl. The grumpy priest in their little church had looked at her with reverence under his thick grey brows now. Synne had felt no different than before, except that she could now drag trees the woodworkers felled back to the village on her own, so apparently the people were right. At night, she had stared into the darkness wondering if somehow she had felt it, the hand of a god, but she could not remember anything like it.

It wasn’t unknown for the gods to touch a commoner, but most gods-touched children were born of parents who already had a holy bloodline. Besides, you never thought it would be you once you grew out of the age of make-believe games.

Not long until the story had spread, Lord Warrick of the Wyrewood and his wife Lady Everild Thalmer had knocked at the door of her father’s little hut. They were the lieges Synne’s family belonged to, frequent guests at the king’s court, it was told, and with lands so vast they had never seen most of their serfs, for their knights handled their great holdings for them. And yet, they had greeted Synne and her father as if the old miner was doing them a kindness by allowing them to stoop through the low entrance into his hovel and dirty their clothes by sitting on his creaking bench.

Lord Warrick and Lady Everild were gods-touched both. You could see it on the lady – her wings, white as snow, were folded on her back. Lord Warrick had showed Synne his power when she greeted him with her hands cut up from the splintered handle of a pickaxe she’d been using today. Under his fingers, her skin had mended.

“It only works on fresh wounds,” he had told her father with a polite nod at his mangled left leg. “But perhaps you will have reprieve regardless, should you accept our offer.”

The offer was such: Synne would be a lady, and daughter to Lord Warrick and Lady Everild. Her family would be cared for, but not be around her much, as that would be unseemly.

“The gods have chosen you for greater things,” Lady Everild told her. “I believe you were meant to be our daughter. That is why you were born in our lands.”

Synne and her father had talked it over, but in Synne’s mind, there was no decision. Her mother had been crushed under a boulder shaken free down there in those miserable, dark tunnels in an earthquake; she’d not lose her siblings or her father there, nor her own life, if the gods put it in her power to prevent it. Her father’s smile had been sad as he had embraced her. Synna had tried not to cry.

Two days later, a carriage had brought her to her new home, a castle with six huge towers stabbing into a washed-out grey sky. Now she stood in a hall bigger than any building she’d ever been in before, letting Lady Everild pick at her worn feast day clothes with a frown on her face.

“We’ll get you washed and dressed, Synne,” she said. “Your chambermaid will help you. Perhaps I can put some flowers in your hair for your first evening here! My daughter,” she gave a brief smile, “excuse me, my _other_ daughter has such limp hair, but yours is thick and strong. It will look very becoming.”

Synne knew of the other daughter. It had been quite a shock, considering how long and strong the holy bloodline of both of her parents’ families had run, when it became clear a couple years back that she was not chosen by the gods.

“When will I meet Lady Leanne?” Synne asked.

She’d been the oldest child in her family, but she knew Lady Leanne had three or four years on her. It might be interesting to have a big sister.

“She is in her chambers,” Lord Warrick said. “You’ll have to hurry, though.”

Since the maid came to fetch her, Synne didn’t have time to ask why.

Half an hour later, Synne was dressed in green silk that felt cold and slippery on her skin, with her hair brushed out and adorned with a circlet, her feet squeezed in thin shoes that she was afraid would rip at every step. It was dressed as such that she was brought to the door of Lady Leanne’s room.

The older daughter of the lord and lady opened up. Standing in the doorway, Synne found her several inches shorter than herself, thin as a twig, with limp blond hair like her mother had said, her shoulders hanging under some invisible weight. She stared at Synne out of watery blue eyes. Synne bowed her head.

“My lady.”

“You’re the one who is taking my inheritance?” Lady Leanne asked.

Synne stopped short. “Well, I...”

“I don’t wish to talk to you,” Lady Leanne said, already turning away. “I don’t care who you are.”

With that, Synne found the door shut in her face.

-

“And the women work the mines, too, in your village? That’s peculiar,” Lord Warrick noted.

“It’s the only way for most families to eat,” Synne said, poking at the thick slab of lamb on her plate with the eating knife she’d been handed. She couldn’t remember ever seeing so much meat on the supper table at once, covered in thick sauce and surrounded by an array of cooked vegetables. The smell of the white roses Lady Everild had put in her hair hung heavy over that of the food.

“Too sad. But you won’t be ruining your hands here,” Lady Everild answered.

Synne nodded her head, looking at the empty chair beside her.

“Isn’t Lady Leanne going to join us?”

The lord and lady exchanged a brief glance. She thought she saw sadness in Lady Everild’s eyes; something like sympathy in her husband’s.

“Leanne is already on the way to the harbour,” she said. “She’ll be travelling to Oldstone Keep, where her uncle lives. His sons need someone to keep an eye on them and that will be good practice for her. You see – my Leanne is well-mannered and educated, but since the gods didn’t choose to touch her, there are little prospects she has but to live in a noble household and look after their children. I mean, maybe a merchant might still marry her! She’s good with numbers and they don’t expect anything but healthy children, most.” Her smile was tight, but lightened as it fell on Synne. “But you, my dear, will have a line of suitors when you’re old enough. A gods-touched girl from a family not even freemen – you were uniquely chosen. They might send one of the princes for your hand, even.”

Nothing in life comes without a price, Synne’s mother used to say. Who was paying, though? Synne would have preferred that she’d be the one to handle her own debts. But the gods didn’t let you choose, neither the station in life you were born in nor whom they graced with their touch. And anyway, she’d bet that girl had worn some silver jewellery in her time, even if they hadn’t let her keep it now, the sort that Synne could never see without imagining bloody smears on it, knowing how it had been clawed out of the mountain’s bowels. Leanne was hardly innocent, was she? She couldn’t be.

With a conscious effort, Synne replaced the drawn face of Leanne with an image of her mother’s arm sticking out crooked under the boulder, her soot-stained siblings coughing out stone dust, her father limping down the mine shaft with his bad leg, and smiled brightly at her new parents.


End file.
